For a month I’ve been trying to build myself a PC for Qubes OS, since my laptop is not compatible with cubes, so I wrote out components for a side desktop PC for Qubes OS decided to assemble a PC from such parts:
At the moment, I found these components only in the store, I have not ordered them yet.
Assume this is somethings, nobody can tell you exactly and you only can try to install QubesOS on this machine. Thats why the Qubes staff created a HCList, where you can found out about devices, that works well with QubesOS.
analyzing the forum, I saw that people have a PC with this MSI PRO Z690-A board
If you don’t plan to passthrough it to one of your qubes then the Intel iGPU would be enough for Qubes OS, because it’s not using GPU acceleration inside qubes and GPU is only used in dom0.
If you want to use 6400 MHz DDR5 memory, maybe the MSI Z790-P is a better option. It’s pretty much identical to the Z690-A, just with a newer chipset, it has the same Qubes OS support, and it can also use the Dasharo/Coreboot firmware.
You should consider using an AIO water cooler, it’s a better option for the K models.
I have a system with a D15 Noctau cooler, and it just too big for most PC cases. The MSI motherboards are only going to allow you to mount the heat sink vertically, the RAM is blocking the outer fan in the other direction.
I’m looking into this board with the 14900KS. I’m planning on going all-out, in hopes that it will be high-performance for at least a decade, hopefully two or three. I don’t care about new features, as long as it’s future-resistant, and I don’t mind paying for premium parts to get the best performance.
The main thing I’ve been concerned about is thermal design. it seems that the main thing preventing these chips from being all they can be is the cooling system, and I haven’t heard of one that will keep it cool when going 100%. I’ve even been considering delidding. Do you know of any cooling systems that can do this?
If you plan on running the CPU at max recommended settings, both PL1 and PL2 at 320W, I don’t think there is any consumer cooling solution that is going to prevent it from throttling.
If you are going to run the CPU with more reasonable power limits, you can get a lot of performance with a 420mm AIO water cooler, and they are not very expensive.
The 13th and 14th gen chips run as fast as they can with a given cooling solution, they are not really designed to permanently run at their absolute max limits. If you enable all the thermal boost technology in the firmware, the chip will try to run the long duration boost at 70C, and the performance depends on how efficient your cooling solution is.
i’d recommend to take a look at nitrokey.com. they sell qubes certified tower PCs. novacustom.com sells laptops that are qubes certified.